St. Hildegard never studied chant. She wrote a sung play.

DISIBODENBERG, 1136 AD — Saint Hildegard of Bingen has written a play to be sung. Fifteen Virtues and the Devil fight over one Soul in it. Every voice in the play — the Virtues, the Soul, the Devil — sings music she made.

St. Hildegard is in charge of the women at Disibodenberg, a group of nuns living inside a house of monks. It stands on a hill where the river Nahe meets the river Glan. The sisters picked her for the job this year, after her teacher, Jutta of Spanheim, died. She said no, and the abbot told her she had to take it. Her music is made for those sisters to sing. She is writing the play down at the same time as she writes the Scivias.

In the play, a whole chorus of souls sing that they are exiles. They should have been the daughters of a king, they sing, and through Adam’s fall they lost what should have been theirs.

Then one soul steps out of the chorus. She asks for the shining robe that was hers when she was made, and she calls on all the Virtues to help her wear it. They answer that they will go to war at her side, because she is a king’s daughter.

Then the Soul stops fighting. She sings about the weight she is carrying: “What heavy work, and what a hard weight I am carrying… because fighting against the flesh is too much for me.” The Virtues tell her that she is the one who is to beat the Devil, with them around her. The Soul answers that she does not know what to do or where to run. She cannot carry the robe she has been dressed in: “I mean to throw it off.”

She throws the robe off and runs to the world. The Devil is waiting for her there: “Fool, fool, what good is all this work to you? Look at the world, and it will take you in its arms and do you great honour.”

The Soul comes back covered in sores

Humility is the queen of the Virtues, and she names herself in the play: “Ego humilitas, regina virtutum” (I am Humility, the queen of the Virtues). The Virtues mourn the Soul who has gone: “Oh, oh, let us Virtues beat our breasts and mourn, because the Lord’s sheep has run away from life.” Then the Soul comes back and tells them what she is: “I am a sinner, I ran away from life, I am full of open sores, and I am coming to you so that you will hold out to me the shield of redemption.” Humility tells the other Virtues to take the sinner in, crying and scarred as she is, and to bring her to Humility.

The Devil speaks again when the Soul comes back. He tells the Soul he will throw her down in the fight. The Soul answers that everything the Devil does is evil. She ran away from him, she says, and now she is fighting him.

So Humility calls on another of the Virtues, Victory, who beat the Devil once already in heaven. “Run with your soldiers, all of you, and tie this devil up,” Humility tells her. They tie the Devil up, and the Virtues sing praise to Christ, the king of the angels. The last voice in the play belongs to the Son of God, speaking to his Father: “Father, look: I am showing you my wounds. So now, all of you, bend your knees to your Father, and he will hold his hand out to you.”

Every one of those voices sings, and St. Hildegard wrote the music for all of them. She says she made and sang chant “without being taught by anyone, since I had never studied neumes or any chant at all.”